President Donald J. Trump doesn’t want to take a scalpel to the Environmental Protection Agency; he wants to take an axe to it.

As reported by The Associated Press, the former chief of Trump’s transition team at the EPA said he has little doubt that the president will seek large budget and staff cuts at a federal bureaucracy that was transformed by the preceding administration into the federal government’s primary global warming shill.

In an interview with the AP, Myron Ebell said that Trump is probably going to start off with major staff cuts at the EPA, which currently has 15,000 employees. Ebell, who left the transition team recently, did not divulge specifically which staff might be targeted. (RELATED: Stay up-to-date on Trump’s progress in cutting the agency at EPA.news)

When the AP asked what he himself would like to see happen, Ebell said that a jumping off point would be to cut the EPA’s staffing by at least 50 percent.

“Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” said Ebell, who has returned to his position as head of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that opposes “global-warming alarmism.”

Like many on Trump’s transition team and among his Cabinet picks, Ebell has been a strong critic of environmental regulations, mostly because they impose strict job-killing rules on businesses without really doing much to improve air and water quality.

“President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit,'” Ebell said. “I think the administration is likely to start proposing cuts to the 15,000 staff, because the fact is that a huge amount of the work of the EPA is actually done by state agencies. It’s not clear why so many employees are needed at the federal level.”

In addition, a lot of the EPA’s work can be done by private entities, like CWC Labs.

As noted by the Washington Examiner, having far less staff and a lower budget would mean that the EPA couldn’t churn out nearly as many regulations as it was used to doing during the Obama administration.

And without question, that’s one of Trump’s primary objectives: cutting the size, scope, cost and reach of the federal leviathan as much as possible, while still maintaining the core functions of government.

But this kind of approach will be opposed by all Democrats and more Republicans than you might imagine. It’s not politically fashionable to cut government – or “drain the swamp,” as Trump has phrased it – because big government means control, and as long as members of Congress and their allies in the bureaucracy are in control, that’s more important than whether or not government runs efficiently.

The fact is, as a man who has spent his life running businesses, Donald Trump is the first president in decades who has had to deal with the bureaucracy firsthand, and has seen how it can stifle growth, kill opportunity and drag down the economy, on both a local and national level. Ebell understood all of this too, which is why Trump picked him to do the transition with the EPA.

In the meantime, Trump’s political appointees have been deleting and editing data that had been published on the EPA’s website regarding “climate change,” taking down phony evidence claiming that the earth is warming and that human activity is responsible for it. Despite what the agency and the Obama administration, as well as Left-wing leaders and their scientists around the world say, there is no hard evidence at all to prove that, though there is plenty of data that has been faked in the attempt.

In his interview, Ebell said that getting rid of EPA staff and reducing its budget is vital because the agency’s leaders under Obama have “politicized” global warming and climate change, allowing activists to publish “junk science” and faked data in order to fit the last administration’s narratives on the issue. (RELATED: How successful will Trump be at cutting government? Check out BigGovernment.news)

“Undoubtedly the federal government has been staffed with scientists who believe the global-warming alarmist agenda,” said Ebell.